Smaller

After fifteen years, I revisited the house of my childhood.

This was a couple months ago, while my family was still in the DC area. I was born a Virginian, growing up first in that wonderful college town called Blacksburg (I don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything bad about Blacksburg - and I honestly can't think of another town with that distinction), then, ages five through almost thirteen in a suburb outside of Richmond. After that, we moved to a flat and swampy place, which is and isn't home.

Would leaving anywhere at thirteen mean leaving with a bad taste in your mouth? That was the case for Richmond. While I missed the hills and the seasons, I had just walked through that threshold called middle school where the young and the oily exercise some primal need to create tribes and enemies. My experience was nothing unusual, but it created enough isolation and self-loathing that I was not unhappy about moving on.

Pre-Middle School, you could not have asked for a better neighborhood to grow up in, this suburb of Richmond. First the hills. There will hills on the streets, around the block, that seemed to go down forever, teaching courage 1st grade bike riders. There were other hills that went through peoples yards, between houses. Once or twice a year, God gave us enough snow to close schools and send us sledding between trees and down storm drains. There were also trees. The oak trees of our neighborhood were worthy of poetry, diminishing houses in their majesty and falling enough leaves to busy every Saturday throughout the fall. Oh, and the yards. Each house had an enormous backyard and an enormous front yard, yards that, to my little eyes, were like football fields - and to this purpose we used them, running and tackling on leaves and acorns.

Our own yard was its own wilderness. It sloped on a hill I don't know how many meters until you finally reached a chain-linked fence. At the top, there was grass, but down at the end of the hill, which we would sled down Calvin & Hobbes style (I was never brave enough to try a wagon), was a wooded area - our own forest of the towering oaks. It had a little stream bed going through it, not to mention a play house the previous owners left for us, and a garage, the roof of which was my little place of solace. It was a back yard a child could literally explore.

And then our house. Our house was multilevel - when I was a little older and our upstairs was populated by sisters and the residue of pink-lacy toys, I got my own room in the basement-lower level. We had a living room upstairs which my mom could keep presentable for the outside world, and a downstairs den with a chocolate brown carpet that children could keep as dirty as a baseball diamond. My favorite feature of the house was the exterior. The lower level was brick, but the upper level, the face of the house up to the pointed roof, was Tudor style - a white background with brown beams and brown trim around the windows. It made the house stand out as something handsome in this world, something you could point to smiling saying, this is where I live.

We returned to Richmond as spring was just awakening, because I thought it would be a shame to live in Washington for more than four years and not show my wife the house of my childhood. We stayed with some dear old friends - the sort of friends you invite to weddings whatever the separation of time and space. Then, we saw our old neighborhood.

It should not have come as a surprise. After all, I've grown. But my old neighborhood was smaller. It was as if the entire world had swallowed a shrinking mushroom from Alice in Wonderland. The hills were bumps, mere formalities between higher and lower. The trees no longer towered, naked as they were from the winter. The biggest trees, my favorite trees, the ones in the front yard in the flowerbed with the squirrel nests, had been felled. They had gotten sick, reported a neighbor. Worst of all was the exterior change to my house. The Tudor style front needed to be replaced several years and go, and so it was - with hospital-white panels. It looked like the side of a trailer. So many of the other houses were still handsome.

Something else was also smaller. Those middle school memories, my first confrontations with human nature at its ugliest - when human nature has woken up and hasn't had coffee - the memories of hate and isolation. They were tiny. They were overcome, replaced by time, space, adulthood and the power to make your own decisions. They were overcome by a God of love, who took the worst of human nature upon himself and rose again. The God who loves the young and the oily.

We had a wonderful neighbor who still lived there. She told stories of who was left and who moved on. Her front yard was peppered with wonderful toys for the neighborhood children to use. One little boy, who lived somewhere nearby among hills and trees, hopped on a scooter and, with speed and courage, road down the incline that was my neighbor's driveway. I bet he thought it was a mountain.